Starting SEO: 4 Beginner Videos

Learning to grasp SEO is difficult for the majority of us. With hundreds of factors to consider, it isn’t as simple as A to B. Optimising your website doesn’t have to also mean trawling through hundreds of SEO walkthroughs for your business to start picking up momentum.

What is SEO and why do you need it?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It is a marketing tool which is used by websites to boost their rankings on search engines, like Google. Without SEO, your website stands little chance of being high up on Google. SEO targets specific keywords which are relevant to your business, and then tries to increase your ranking for those words. But this isn’t the whole picture. Google is clever, so an all out approach of loading your site with a high volume of keywords, or “keyword stuffing”, won’t work. That’s why SEO is big business. Starting SEO can seem daunting at first, and there are lots of myths and old wives tales out there, but in this blog we’re going to get down to the basics.

Writing Content for SEO

In SEO, content is king. It’s what drives traffic, and is the flesh and bones of your website which your users will interact with directly. Content quality is very important. Just writing a hundred words which stuff keywords for google wont work, because people will take one look at your page and then leave, because the quality isn’t there. One of the biggest SEO mistakes is to write a lot of content with Google and search engines in mind, and not think about the user experience. Always remember, if it works well for the user, then it will work for Google, because Google wants to show people high quality content. The video below by Brian Scully gives a good introduction to writing SEO content for your website.

SEO Links and SEO Link building

Link building is a vital SEO technique. Having links coming into your website will increase traffic, and therefore increase Google’s perception of you. Equally, having links going out of your site to another, will cause more people to go deeper into your site, or onto a relevant webpage. If more people follow links on your site, it means fewer users are “bouncing” back to Google, which sends bad signals, and makes Google think you have bad content. Link building is the SEO technique networking links between pages on your site and other websites. Internal links follow through to another page on your site, external links follow to another website. The key to link building is not in the number, but in the quality of your links. If you have a number of good backlinks, your page will start ranking higher in the search engines. This video from RankJane.com outlines how to start building links for SEO.

Google Search Console: A great SEO tool

So you know what SEO is, you’ve written great content and started building links, but now what? In order to monitor website performance, you need to use an SEO tool like Google Search Console. Google Search Console is really great because it tells you how Google views your page. It tells you the keywords you rank for, and which pages are performing the best. It tells you how much traffic you have, and whether it is”organic”, meaning it comes from searches, or not. Google Search Console will even tell you if there are any errors on your page, like redirect 301 errors or page not found 404 errors, so you can fix them quickly and optimise your website. Having Google Search Console is so important for SEO, because it not only tells you how you are performing, but also where you are strong, and which pages can improve. The tool is introduced in this short video by the Google Webmasters.

So now you should have a better idea of SEO, and have the tools you need to start boosting your website up the rankings. If you’re interested in our SEO service, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us using our contact form.